Racing, though, even including the top two-year-old colts’ races, the Dewhurst and the Middle Park Stakes, and the fillies’ championship, the Cheveley Park Stakes, was not near my highest priority.
Winds around the globe were increasingly in turmoil as usual in that autumnal time of year, with a full-blown hurricane in the Pacific threatening the south-west California coast, and a destructively raging typhoon coming ashore and drowning people in the Philippines. Japan was suffering appalling waves, called tsunamis, caused by offshore ocean-bed earthquakes.
In the Atlantic the count of hurricanes and lesser tropical depressions had reached thirteen for the year, with possibly the most active cyclonic weeks of autumn still ahead; and although roaring and massive disturbances of hurricane strength seldom reached the British Isles except as decaying systems of heavy rain, to us as to meteorologists round the world they were of ultimate interest.
Two weeks after Caspar Harvey’s lunch the year’s fourteenth cyclonic swirl of clouds formed off the west coast of Africa and crossed the Atlantic slightly north of the Equator. The three essentials for its transformation into a full hurricane were all in place, being, first, a sea-water temperature above 80 degrees Fahrenheit; second, hot air from the tropics converging with equatorial air full of moisture taken up from the sea, and third, winds caused by the warm moist air rising and letting cold air flood in underneath. The rotation of the earth kept the inflowing winds spinning; and the heat of the ocean went on intensifying the whole circling air-mass.
Its identifying name, chosen years before to be given to the fourteenth storm of that season, was Nicky.
Kris watched its development moodily.
‘It’s heading westwards, straight to Florida,’ he complained, ‘and it’s travelling quite fast at 2.0 miles an hour.’
‘I thought you’d be interested,’ I said.
‘Of course I’d be interested, but it will get there ahead of me, won’t it? I don’t go for another eight days.’
‘It’s getting more organised,’ I commented, nodding. ‘The surface winds are circling at about 80 miles an hour already.’
Kris said, ‘I’ve always wanted to fly through a hurricane.’ He paused. ‘I mean... as a pilot... fly through one.’
I listened to the fanatical relish in his voice: he wasn’t making idle chat.
‘People do, you know,’ he said seriously.
‘It’s crazy,’ I said, but I wanted to as well, badly.
‘Just think of it!’ His pale eyes glazed with growing excitement. ‘And don’t tell me the idea of it doesn’t get your own blood racing, because who was it who competed in the high-surfing contests in north Cornwall? Who can stand upright on a surfboard? Riding the tunnel, isn’t it called?’
‘The tube. That was different. It was totally safe.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Well, almost.’
‘I’ll fly you safely through Hurricane Nicky.’
To his enormous disappointment, however, he didn’t get the chance. Hurricane Nicky, although intensifying to a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with circulating wind speeds between 111 and 130 miles an hour, not only didn’t wait around for Kris to arrive in the States, but turned northwards before it reached the American eastern seaboard at all, and blew itself out harmlessly over the cold waters of the North Atlantic.
Kris nevertheless set off to Florida, with the rocketry at Cape Canaveral as his priority, followed by contacts with the National Hurricane Tracking Center in Miami, but no storms at all, to his great disappointment, were shaping up in their chief spawning ground, west of Africa.
During an otherwise uneventful week there he sent me a fax to say he was now staying for a few days with the people we had met at Caspar Harvey’s lunch, as arranged.
I couldn’t remember at first whom he meant. The lunch itself had receded in my mind, semi-eclipsed by the poisoning of the filly, but a backward-looking search came up tentatively with the Darcys; Robin the brains and Evelyn the pearls.
Confirmation quickly followed. Kris despatched: ‘This is a casual place. Robin and Evelyn are adamant they want you to join us on Monday, to stay for a few days, so send a yes-thank you pronto. Just to remind you, the minor disturbance now forming in the Caribbean will be called Odin if it develops. I intend to fly through it. Won’t you come?’
The minor disturbance in the Caribbean, I judged from a swift trawl of the chaotic conditions there, would probably collapse into a fizzle, saving the name Odin for another day.
Next morning, though, the winds south of Jamaica gained speed, and the barometric pressure dropped to well below 1000 millibars, an ominously low reading considering that the average was nearer 1013. A wind sheer aloft that had been preventing an organised circling movement had disintegrated and stopped tearing the upper atmosphere apart, and the minor disturbance, as if taking stock of the possibilities, had begun a slow invitation to a dance.
Kris transmitted: ‘Odin is now designated a tropical storm. Pity it’s not yet a hurricane, but come on Monday anyway.’ He included directions to reach the Darcys, and welcoming messages from both.
The Monday ahead was the beginning of my official leave.
I pondered over the meagre savings I’d intended to devote to walking in Sicily, and then telephoned Belladonna Harvey. I learned about the state of the filly (feeble but on her feet, test results still not available): the state of Oliver Quigley (lachrymose): the state of her relations with her new employer Loricroft (he was chasing her) and the state of her father (fuming). And how was Kris doing, she finally wanted to know, as he’d been missing from the screen for a week.
‘He went to Florida.’
‘So he did.’
‘He wanted you to go.’
‘Mm.’
‘He’s staying with Robin and Evelyn Darcy. They’ve asked me to join them. Is that odd?’
There was a pause before she said, ‘What do you want to know?’
With a smile that I knew reached my voice, I asked, ‘For a start, what does he do?’
‘Evelyn tells everyone he sells mushrooms. He never denies it.’
‘He can’t sell mushrooms,’ I protested.
‘Why not? Evelyn says he sells all the sorts of mushrooms the food world’s gone mad about. Portobello, ceps, chanterelles, shitake, things like that. He has them freeze-dried and sealed in vacuum packs and they’re making him a fortune.’ She paused, ‘Also he sells grass.’
‘He what?’
‘He sells grass. I don’t mean that sort of grass. You may laugh, but in Florida they don’t grow garden grass from seed. The climate’s wrong, or something. They plant sods instead. They lay lawns like laying carpets. Robin Darcy has a sod farm. Don’t laugh. That’s what it’s called, and it’s a million-dollar business.’
I said slowly, ‘You also said he was born clever.’
‘Yes. He was. And I told you not to be fooled. He goes around in those thick black spectacle frames looking like a rather inadequate and cuddly little ninny, but everything he touches turns to gold.’
‘And do you like him?’ I asked.
‘Not really.’ She answered without hesitation. ‘He’s Dad’s buddy, not mine. He’s too calculating. Everything he does has a purpose, but you only realise that later.’
‘And Evelyn?’ I asked.
‘She’s his front man, like I told you. Well, woman. I’ve known them for ages, on and off. Robin and Dad have always talked farming, though you wouldn’t think mushrooms and sod have much in common with birdseed, which is Dad’s major industry.’
I said vaguely, ‘I thought your father grew barley.’
‘Yes, he does. It makes great whisky. He doesn’t grow the birdseed. He buys every variety of seed by the hundred tons and has a factory which mixes them and sells them in small packets to people who keep budgerigars and things. You might say that both Robin Darcy and my father make millions a hundred grams at a time.’